We know from Swedenborg’s writings that we are in constant communication with angelic beings. Unknown to us, an angelic influx of some sort subtly flows into our hearts and minds.
Swedenborg states that angels are tasked with helping us overcome our evil affections. He writes that these guardian angels know “nothing more delightful and happy than to remove evils from a man, and lead him to heaven.”
Angels, he writes, delight in our repentance. They do not keep this happiness to themselves. They share it with other angelic societies. Then, after performing their uses, angelic ‘shepherds’ return to their home society and are permitted to communicate their joy. They spread their happiness throughout heaven.
Rudolf Steiner, a mystic from over a century ago, had an interesting theory on how these angels go about their work. He described it in his voluminous essay, ‘The work of the angels in man’s astral body’.
To summarise, Steiner suggested that a great many events take place in a person’s routine life and most of us are ‘asleep’ as to what spiritual realities were present in these seemingly trivial events, e.g. arguments we had with our partners, the choices we made at work, our conversations with children, our chance meetings with strangers, etc.
If a person is spiritually conscious, angelic beings propel the person to explore their actions and feelings that occurred during these events and extract out the moral lessons and spiritual guidance contained within them. We do this best through the process of regular introspection and journaling. We do even better when we couple this process with the framework provided by religion and scripture. This process is akin to the Logopraxis approach used in our church and community.
From Steiner’s point of view, whenever random memories of the past pop-up in our minds, such as a relationship break-up, we are to allow ourselves to wrestle with what actually happened and to make peace with these by trying to see it from different angles. If we dismiss them by saying ‘he was always X or she was always Y’ then we are simply leaving the impulses unprocessed and to be filed away for another time. (Bruce chalton’s blog has an excellent write-up on how to deal with these traumatic memories in old-age. Bruce pleads with us to keep adding new understandings to recurring memories)
Steiner suggested that in earlier historical periods, angels weren’t as equipped to nudge Man into the process of reflection. This is because many do not give much thought to the idea of the resurrection. The resurrection, according to him, made people conscious of the need to look into the quality of their lives and make changes for a life continued ‘as is’ in another realm post-death.
Therefore, in earlier time periods, angels had to resort to less effective ways of implanting impulses such as through dreams, visions, super-natural events, sexual desires for a certain type of individual, karmic debt, prophecies, festivals and clergy with metaphysical abilities.
Dreams especially because it replayed the events that were passed over as trivial in the waking state. Festivals because they put a marker for us to reflect on the period before. Sexuality because it is inherently concerned with the mystery of birth as well as the ‘inclination to brotherhood’.
These impulses were not as effective as reflection and introspection because it put Man under ‘compulsion’ to explore spiritual realities. For example, the superficialities and literalism of the dream clouded the meanings behind them. The search for meaning did not arise from free-thinking and so people operated out of feelings of obedience, reward and fear. In fact Steiner goes as far as to include early-church religious practices like the rituals of the mass in the ‘compulsion’ category because it kept the individual in a state of passiveness and resignation to a ‘flow’ that would carry them over to a state of being ‘right with God and neighbour’.
Such spirituality was driven by unconscious forces. Steiner saw the resurrection as an event that asked of Man to instead ‘reach the Spirit through thinking‘.
Steiner alluded that the genius of our current age is that we are inquisitive and actively question things. The progress we have made in the natural sciences arises from this freedom to ‘think’. We see this best with our young ones who ‘google’ nearly everything and often fact-check adults. They are compelled by culture to embrace ‘thinking’ and not just to be led.
Steiner warned though that this inquisitiveness would lead many deeper into materialism and deny spirituality.
This was because he feared that Man would use such a gift in service of material life and not spiritual life i.e. we would not use our rational facilities to explore the spiritual in the same way we explore the material world.
In summary, Steiner builds on Swedenborg to go deep within ourselves to see what lies beneath. The more we do so, the more we make ourselves open to ‘purer’ impulses from angels.
note: Steiner deviates from Swedenborg in many areas especially his belief in reincarnation but a lot can be made to fit a Swedenborgean angle.